


An Infinite Beauty

by aveyune23



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: A Love Letter to REI, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Eventual Romance, F/M, Friendship, Mentions of previous heavy drug abuse, Reaching rock bottom and hiking your way out, Shameless Backpacking Gear Product Placement, The Backpacking AU, excessive use of John Muir quotes, loosely based on the book "wild", lots of mountains and deserts and trees, mentions of previously exchanging sex for drugs, the author has a thing for the outdoors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-05-10 01:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aveyune23/pseuds/aveyune23
Summary: "What are you doing out here?" he asked, but she didn't know how to answer. Where did she even start?“I lost something,” she finally replied, picking at a snag in her shorts. “I guess I came out here to find it.”He smiled at her, and it made her heart race.“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks,” he said matter-of-factly, as though he were reciting it from a book, but then he gave her a soft look. “I’m sure you’ll find it if you look hard enough.”At rock bottom and with nothing to lose, Jyn Erso makes the impulsive decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, and finds love and redemption along the way.





	1. Mojave

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! This fic has been something that I've wanted to write for a long time, and I finally got the right excuse to do it. This story takes some inspiration from the memoir "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed, which is my favorite book in the entire world, but is mostly based off my own personal experiences with backpacking. Please enjoy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mojave, California  
> Elevation: 2762ft  
> Mile 0  
> Day 0

The motel was pink. It shared a parking lot with a liquor store. Old friends would have said she’d done that on purpose, but they weren’t her friends anymore, and she hadn’t, anyway. She’d picked this motel because it was cheap, and because she figured it would be easy to hitch a ride to the trailhead, which was only eleven miles away. Eleven miles, and then over six hundred more. Her stomach turned.

 _You can quit any time_ , she reminded herself, but felt even more nauseous after. To quell the feeling she reached into one of the many large brown paper bags on the bed and pulled out whatever was on top. An emergency whistle. Neon orange, “world’s loudest.” She hoped she’d never have to find out if that were true.

She went to the window and stared across the parking lot at the liquor store. There was a McDonald’s across the street. Beer and french fries sounded enticing, but her stomach was still churning anxiously, and she pulled the curtains shut.

_We must keep the curtains drawn, Jyn. The light hurts her eyes._

She clenched her own eyes shut to block out the image that had appeared before her, took three deep breaths, and opened them again.

Motel room. Not a hospital.

She moved restlessly about the room, running fingertips over the television and the sink and the ancient rotary phone on the nightstand. She’d signed her real name on the motel register. _Jyn Erso_. A stranger’s name for a long time, but hers again, reclaimed in a parking lot last winter when she’d been high as a kite and too, too thin and had held the shreds of her life up to the snowflakes as an offering.

_'Take it,’ she thought as mascara-black tears dripped from her chin. ‘Take this shithole life and give me something back that’s better.’_

_The snow turned into a blizzard, which forced her to buy a shovel from the outdoors store down the street so that she could excavate her car. She had wiped the mascara tracks from her cheeks and stood in line with twitching fingers wrapped around her purchase, and her eyes caught the cover of a book on the impulse-buy rack. Mountains, stark and sharp against a blue sky, towering above a crystal clear lake. “The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California.” She picked up the book, turned it over and skimmed the back. A hiking trail, 1723 miles of deserts and mountains and forests, from the Mexican border to Canada. The PCT._

_She put the book back and paid for the shovel._

_She managed to dig her car out, but the snow started coming down so hard that she couldn’t see, so she sat in the driver’s seat with the heat blasting uselessly into the frigid air, feeling so very not in the driver’s seat of her own life, and watched the blizzard rage. It had snowed like that they day Papa died, and the pain welled up inside again, dark and thick and hot, and spilled out._

_The snow was burying the car again, burying her alive the same way her grief was. I used to be good, she thought. My life used to mean something. In her despair, her ghosts returned. She thought about Mama, with her soft eyes and fiery heart and her faith in an unseen that had done nothing when the chemo burned her to ash. She thought about Saw, who had done the best he could with the child that had been abandoned on his doorstep. She thought about Papa, who had left her but found her again, only to be ripped from her grasp once more. She thought about the book with the mountains on the cover, and the wisdom that she was now certain it contained._

_"I won’t fuck it up anymore,” she said into the hot-and-cold air, as though speaking it aloud would make it true. She gripped the steering wheel and stared into the storm outside and vowed._

_“I’m going to walk my way back to the woman they thought I was.”_

That vow had been the fuel that got her clean, that got her a steady-enough serving gig that she could save up the money for the gear she would need, for the food and the spending cash. She had bought the book with the mountains on the cover and read it over and over. She had poured over blogs and forums. She had gone to REI and bought half the store -- pack and bag and pad and cook stove and everything else that the internet had said was necessary. The blogs said “lightweight” so she made sure to get the tent with the aluminum poles that only weighed four pounds, the sleeping bag that weighed one and a half. She bought tuna jerky and granola and rice and noodles and an entire case of freeze-dried meals that she just had to add hot water to. Wool underwear and ultra-thin breathable shorts, moisture-wicking shirts and a 900-fill power RDS certified duck down puffy for the nights on the snow-capped peaks of the High Sierras. She took a first aid course and practiced using her water filter in the sink. It had cost every penny she had, almost all of the money left to her by her family. She would have nothing when she finished her journey -- nothing except herself and the pack on her back and, she hoped, a reason for living a better life.

All of the money she had spent was now sitting on the bed in front of her in the brown paper REI bags or already stuffed into compression sacks like her sleeping bag and her clothes. Her pack was leaning against the footboard, a wine red 65-liter Osprey that she had tried on in the store. They’d made her walk around the building with it on after it had been loaded with sandbags. The salesperson had asked her how much weight she usually carried before putting the bags in it, and having no idea what the right answer was, she had sputtered “oh, y’know, average,” which had apparently been sufficient. She hadn’t buckled under it, which she took as a good sign, and it didn’t feel terribly heavy and didn’t shift when she climbed the stairs. It was actually rather like a hug, and figuring that was something ideal, she had bought it. She looked at it now with the tiniest bit of apprehension. Everything she would need for the next three months would have to be carried in that wine-colored backpack. Over every possible terrain, in every possible weather, this pack would be her sole companion.

The idea wasn’t terribly daunting. _Alone_ was a feeling she was incredibly familiar with. In the year and a half since her father’s death she had come to see _alone_ less as a state of being and more as a physical place that she could retreat to when she needed to be herself, instead of whoever she was pretending to be. She liked _alone_ . It was a comfortable space where she knew all of the rules. In _alone_ , the only person she could hurt was herself, and she’d done enough of that in the past to ever want to do it again. Reaching _alone_ was the purpose of this hike.

But _alone_ and _lonely_ were two different things, and the latter was settling in on her now. When she had paid for her room, the woman behind the counter had told her that it would cost more if she had a companion. Jyn had insisted that there would be no one else in the room with her, but the motel worker had given her a “sure honey” eye before taking her money. It made her angry now, to have a stranger assume that she would be calling someone to join her, but she also knew that six months ago, she probably would have. Men were trouble. Men were the reason she had to turn her life around in the first place. Bad boyfriends, bad fathers -- She stopped the thought there and shook her head. Whatever she had felt before, she knew her fathers were not responsible for where she had ended up. She might have once thought that their abandonment of her that had brought her to the path of self-destruction, but that wasn’t true. It was grief.

Her chest felt tight for the swiftest of moments, the pain she felt when she thought about her parents. Her mother was taken from her when she was eight. Lung cancer. She’d never smoked a thing in her life. The doctors had told her that she would have a year, but she was gone in four months. When her mother died, her father left, too. He’d abandoned her with Saw, a family friend, but Saw had been absent as well, feeling that she was old enough to parent herself. He died after she’d graduated high school, cancer again. In her grief, she’d decided to bury herself in a degree. She’d had a free ride to the university her father taught at. She hadn’t wanted to see him, angry at him for leaving her after her mother had died, but when he’d called her that first time, she had cracked right down the middle and forgiven him. They were a family again, and she had been happy. But she was only given a year with him -- the winter of her sophomore year, he was killed in a car accident, and the last remaining part of Jyn Erso had died with him.

She had given up after that. Her pain had obliterated her ability to hold back, to say no to the things that would take away her grief. A week after her father died she kissed a stranger in a bar so that she could get a free drink. A month after that the boyfriend of a friend offered her Oxy in exchange for sex. She had been the textbook definition of a downward spiral. She became the girl that said ‘yes.’ She flunked out of school. She bounced from restaurant to restaurant, waiting tables for petty cash until she got fired for being late or being high or both. She had taken stupid risks, destroyed her life. And a year after her father died, she had gotten stuck in a blizzard and broken down and bought a shovel and a book with mountains on the cover, and promised herself and the ghosts of her parents that enough was enough.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It had been a long drive to Mojave from LA, and she should have been tired, but she wasn’t. Her heart was pounding and she had broken out in a  sweat that felt too much like withdrawal, even though she’d been clean for months. She needed to sleep. She would be getting up early tomorrow so that she could hit the trail before it got too hot. She should take a shower, and savor it, because it was likely to be the last one she had for the foreseeable future. She should get in the bed (also the last one for a while) and watch some TV (again, another last) until she fell asleep. She should do all of these things. But she didn’t. Instead, she stared at the rotary phone.

She’d gotten rid of her cell phone in LA. There was no need for it on the PCT. She was going to be in one of the last true wildernesses in the US -- it was idiotic to assume she would have service. She had a GPS that could send out an emergency signal if she got into trouble, but otherwise, aside from postcards and payphones, she had no way to contact the outside world. But what did it matter? There was no one in the outside world that could help her in the way she needed.

In a way it felt good to be free of her phone. No Facebook or Instagram to scroll through mindlessly. She had gotten a decent digital camera for the trip so that she at least had a way to take pictures. Maybe she could make a photo album. Put them down on real paper instead of releasing them into the internet void. The idea eased her anxiety a bit. When she reached the end and crossed the border into Oregon, she would have evidence. Real, photographic proof that she had accomplished the impossible.

But she hadn’t accomplished anything yet. She hadn’t even made it through the door.

Tomorrow, she thought as she stripped off her clothes to climb into the shower. Tomorrow she would load her pack and put on her brand new hiking clothes and walk out the door of the pink motel to hitch a ride to the Tehachapi Pass trailhead eleven miles away. And then she would turn her face to the north, and simply… walk. She would step forward, and leave her old life behind, with all of its pain and troubles.

She couldn’t know that she would only find more.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that this introduction is very intense, but when you're at rock bottom, it can only go up from there. 
> 
> In the next chapter: Jyn loads her pack. Its a lot more eventful than she imagines.


	2. Lift With Your Legs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mojave, California  
> Elevation:2762ft  
> Mile 0  
> Day 1

Jyn was awake long before the alarm clock on the nightstand went off. The combination of nerves and the intermittent wheezing rattle of the window AC unit had been too much -- she’d managed only a few hours of fitful sleep before she had finally given up and turned the television back on. The late night infomercials lulled her back into a doze, but every time the AC kicked back on she would jolt awake, hearing the crunch of car metal instead of freon coils, and then she spent the following moments cramming her heart back down into her chest after it had jumped into her throat. By 5AM she decided  _ to hell with it _ and pushed back the blankets and swung her legs out, pressing her toes into the cheap green carpet like it was an anchor. Hospital waiting rooms didn’t have green shag carpet, she told herself, then took a deep breath and opened her eyes. The first thing they focused on was her pack leaning against the wall, its reflective eagle logo glowing faintly in the light that the leaked through the curtains like the eyes of a sentinel. Her lips twitched up when she saw it. 

“Just you and me,” she murmured, then pushed herself off the bed.

Breakfast was a Clif bar and a banana (“last piece of fresh fruit”). Jyn dug into one of the REI bags and pulled out her new clothes -- a light grey moisture-wicking t-shirt and a pair of knee-length khaki ripstop shorts. These, on top of a sports bra and a rotating trio of thin nylon panties with anti-microbial treatment, were to be her uniform for the next three months, her protection against the elements.

It all looked terribly inadequate.

But when she pulled the outfit on, it settled comfortably on her shoulders and hips, and it felt very much like donning a suit of armor. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the sink and thought,  _ I can do this _ .

Her boots were new, brown leather with purple accents on the laces. When she’d bought them she’d thought  _ those are cute _ , as if looking cute while backpacking was a priority, but she’d had them fitted anyway. Purple was her favorite color -- perhaps it would bring her luck. They fit her like a glove, and after she laced them up she straightened (a good inch and a half taller now thanks to the heavy lugs on the soles) and stared at her reflection.

Well, at least she  _ looked _ like she knew what she was doing. That counted for something, right? She had always been a “fake it ‘til you make it” girl anyway. How was backpacking any different?

She knew she was wrong, of course. More than likely  _ dead _ wrong, if she didn’t wise up and start behaving realistically. But for now, in the mildew-scented quiet of the motel room, she could imagine for a moment that wearing the right clothes meant she was safe and sturdy and strong and capable of hiking across an entire state with nothing but the things she could carry.

Those things she would be carrying, however, were still in the brown paper bags on the bed, waiting to be packed. She turned to look at them, their sides bulging, and then looked at her pack, still propped up against the wall. Her stomach turned as she suddenly thought,  _ How will it all fit?  _ She stamped it down as quickly as it appeared. Of course it would fit. It had to. Why wouldn’t it?

Jyn went to the bed and pulled the World’s Loudest Whistle out of the nearest bag. Well, she had to start somewhere.

She had at least used her last contact with the internet to YouTube how to pack her bag. Sleeping bag in a compression sack that doubled as a dry bag and then stuffed into the special compartment at the bottom of her pack. Her sleeping pad would be strapped to the outside of her pack above this compartment. Another compression/dry sack for her clothes -- the down puffy and the wool underwear and the extra socks and everything else that she now considered armor -- tucked into the depths of the bag since she (hopefully) wouldn’t need any of it until she reached camp. On top of that was the dry bag for her water filter and UV sterilization pen, and then the massive dry bag for her food -- enough freeze-dried and insta-food to last her the three weeks it would take to get to Kennedy Meadows, the first major resting point on her journey.

She had read on all of the blogs that she might be lucky enough to come across a Trail Angel or two at some of the smaller camping sites or road crossings. These so called Angels were simply kind people -- usually retirees in campers -- who set up at certain points along the trail and provided small comforts to hikers like barbeque and a cold soda, or offering to mail a postcard or lend a cell phone to make a call. Jyn had read that in the summer these Trail Angels were relatively common, and a part of her wished desperately that she would encounter them, if only to bask in the warm glow of pure human decency for a few moments.

She paused before reaching into the last bag. She’d spent so long hiding from herself away from other people, wearing the mask she had constructed for when she needed to fuck or get high or work whatever late night shift she was pulling at the gig of the week. The name still rolled so easily off her tongue:  _ Liana Hallik. _ She knew how easy it would be to pull that mask out of her pocket if she met anyone, how easy it would be to introduce herself as  _ Liana _ and not  _ Jyn _ . But she also knew that she was so tired of that mask and that name, worn out by how heavy they had become, so despite her fear she was ready to say  _ Hello, my name is Jyn _ , and smile while doing so.

She smiled a bit then, and reached into the final bag, but her smile disappeared the instant she pulled the 10-liter dromedary bag out.

She’d forgotten about the water.

_ Fuck. _

The dromedary bag went  _ inside _ her pack, tucked into a sleeve that lined that back wall of the bag. It was flat now, but would bulge significantly when full.  _ Shit _ , she would have to take everything she’d just packed out just to put the reservoir in the damn thing!

“Fuck,” she cursed as she began yanking gear from her backpack. “Fuck. Fuck!”

It wasn’t just the reservoir that she had to pack, either. There were also four one-liter nalgene bottles that she would be carrying, one of which would hold an electrolyte drink that could be mixed up by squeezing a few drops of concentrate into the bottle. Two would go on either side of her pack in the external pockets on the sides, but the other two would go inside her pack in the hopes that staying out of direct sun would keep them a bit cooler than the ones in the side pockets.

It all seemed excessive, but she would be hiking through the desert. She knew there would be at least two potential water caches, but those weren’t a guarantee -- she would have to carry all of the water she would need. All four gallons of it.

_ How had she forgotten about the water? _

She continued to curse under her breath as she unrolled the dromedary bag, faltering slightly as she saw how big it was, and then cursing louder because of it. She stormed over to the bathroom and flipped on the light before sitting on the edge of the tub with a huff. She twisted the cap off the bag and turned the faucet on, cranking the knob all the way over to cold as though it would make a difference in a few hours ( _ it might, maybe, hopefully _ ). When it was as icy as she figured it would get, she shoved the mouth of the reservoir under the tap and let it fill.

But as the bag slowly filled up, it grew heavier and heavier, until Jyn was holding it up with both hands gripping the slippery vinyl edges. She barely managed to keep it from spilling as she smacked the faucet off and grabbed the cap, twisting it on so tight her knuckles were white, and then let it fall into the tub, watching it bounce and roll like a massive black water balloon.

_ Shit. _

She knew, of course, that water was heavy. Anyone who’d waited tables at a bar knew that. She’d read it on every single blog and forum she’d been on in preparation for this hike: water was heavy. The heaviest thing you’ll carry. 8.35 pounds per gallon.

And she was carrying  _ four. _

Jyn did the math and then collapsed forward with her head in her hands.

33.4 pounds.

Just in water.

“Oh Christ,” she moaned into her hands. “Oh, hells.”

Her stomach roiled, waves of sudden nausea rolling up towards her throat. Briefly she considered breaking down into tears -- but then she dug her fingers deep into her hair, tugged hard at the roots for a single sharp second, and sat up. She shoved her hair off her face and then dragged her hands down to wipe away the panic sweat.

It was only 33.4 pounds.

She grit her teeth and grabbed the full dromedary bag by the edges, braced her feet, and heaved. Not so bad -- she had it airborne, just had to get it into her pack.

She duck-walked out of the bathroom with the reservoir bumping wetly against her knees, the sound like skin slapping skin. It made her freeze, and she clenched her eyes shut and took deep breaths as the memories tore through her.

_ The back alley behind dive bar job #4 and the biker that promised her an ounce of Colorado Kush if she let him fuck her against the brick. The two frat boys at her old university that she’d let rough her up because they had given her enough Oxy to last a month. Twitchy Joe and the one and only time she did heroin -- he’d said they would go all night if she did. _

She was shaking by the time the flashbacks subsided, and her arms were screaming from having held the dromedary bag up for longer than she was capable of sustaining, but she sucked in a breath and waddled as quickly as she could to her pack. She set it at her feet with an audible  _ plop _ and used one hand to hold open the backpack, and with one mighty grunt she deadlifted the water reservoir and slipped it into the sleeve. Panting, she dropped to her knees.

She didn’t believe in God. Her mother had. She’d prayed with her crystal cross in her hand every day she was in the hospital until she couldn’t speak coherently, and then begged Jyn through cracked lips to say the words for her. She had only been eight years old, but even then she knew -- her mother’s merciful and benevolent Force couldn’t be real, because if It were, why would It dare take her Mama away? She’d wanted to believe, but couldn’t. When Saw had died, and then Papa, she had cursed the very idea of religion, of mercy, of redemption at the hand of an Almighty Power. No one had saved them, because there was no one  _ there _ .

But now, for the briefest of moments, a tiny flicker of desperation escaped her lips before anger and common sense smashed it:

“Please -- give me the strength to do this.”

No one answered, of course, but she felt disappointment only as long as she had felt the desperation. God wasn’t hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Jyn Erso was. And she would do it with her own strength and her own will.

“I can do this,” she said to the room, and pushed herself off the floor.

She filled the four nalgene bottles and repacked her bag, then tightened all the compression straps and stepped back.

It looked about a million times bigger than it had when it was empty, but the reflective eagle logo on the front still gleamed a bit in the sunlight coming through the curtains, and it calmed her racing heart to see it.

She looked at the clock on the nightstand. She needed to get going if she was going to cover decent miles before it got too hot. She still had to find a ride to the trailhead. That made her pulse quicken. She’d never hitch-hiked before. What if --

She laughed out loud at the absurdity of that thought. She’d fucked random men in back alleys and shot up heroin -- and she was about to hike 600 miles through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the country  _ by herself _ . Asking a complete stranger for a ride was likely the least dangerous thing she’d ever done or would ever do.

She nodded at her pack. “Right then.”

She reached down and grabbed the handle at the top, twisted at the hip, pulled --

\-- and nearly yanked her arm out of its socket.

Her pack didn’t budge.

Jyn stared at down at it with wide eyes, then grit her teeth and tried again, this time with both hands.

It still didn’t leave the floor.

“No,” she said. “No, you will  _ not _ do this to me.”

She planted her feet and bent at the knee so that she could lift with her legs, and  _ yes! It was up!  _ She shoved one arm through a strap, then shifted her body to swing the pack around so that she could get her other arm in, but before she could get it through, the pack -- whose weight was now  _ above _ her center of gravity instead  _ below _ \-- continued on the arc she had sent it on with the turn of her torso, and it tipped her over and sent her to the floor with an embarrassingly loud crash and an even louder shout of “ _ FUCK!” _

Her pack -- she decided she was going to name it “Judas” -- was pinning her to the floor. Shit, it wasn’t supposed to be this heavy. She’d bought the lightest gear, had packed only what the experts had said she would need. Bloody hells, the thing felt like it weighed 60 pounds!

_ That’s likely, _ said a tiny voice in her head,  _ considering 33-point-4-fucking pounds of it is just water. _

“Fuck,” she panted. She managed to wiggle her other arm into the shoulder strap while she devised a way to stand without falling over again.

_ Okay. Right. Hip belt. _

She was able to lift her hips enough to get her knees to support her, so that she could buckle the hip belt. This particular pack had a molded belt that opened like a spring-loaded hinge, which meant that it hugged her body when she wore it. She had to support herself on her knees and --  _ oh for fucks sake -- _ her forehead while she used her hands to open the belt and get it around her waist. She fumbled with the clip, the carpet burning her face where she was smashed against it, and she could have cried when she heard the loud  _ click _ , because it meant that she could collapse back to the floor.

She considered just laying there forever, trapped under her pack, face pressed into the green carpet that smelled of mildew and worse -- but no. She hadn’t come _this_ _fucking far_ to give up now.

She pressed her hands to the carpet, placed beneath her shoulders, and pulled her knees under her, ready to shove herself up to all fours. If she could get that far, then she could put her hands on the end of the bed and haul herself to her feet from there. And from there it would be nothing but walking out the door into the sun to find a ride to the trailhead.

She took a couple of quick breaths, psyching herself up, and put all of her energy into pushing herself into tabletop position. The pack on her back swayed dangerously, threatening to pull her to the side, but she steadied herself and carefully sat up. She knelt for a moment so that she could cinch her hip belt so tight she gave herself a muffin top she didn’t normally have, and to clip her sternum strap. She reached to her sides and grabbed the ends of the shoulder strap cinches and yanked down hard, pulling the pack flush against her back, just like the salesperson at REI had taught her. That made her feel a little more stable. She let go of a held breath and planted her hands on the end of the bed, paused in case her pack shifted, but it held steady, and so she lifted one foot and put it to the floor beneath her, and then the other, and  _ ooooooh fuck, okay! _

She was on her feet, frozen, ready to topple over again, but Judas held firm to her back, and Jyn slowly straightened up. It didn’t feel so heavy now that it was secure against her body. She moved a few tentative shifts this way and that, testing, and then adjusted the straps and pulled them tight like they had done at the store, so tight that if she moved even a centimeter in one direction, the pack would follow her that centimeter and no further.

Great. Her backpack was secure. Now she just had to pick up her feet and  _ walk. _

She’d already shoved all of the REI bags into the trash, along with the clothes she’d come in. She had nothing left except what was now on her back.

All 60-something motherfucking pounds of it.

But she was doing it. She was ready. The thought sent a wave of joy through her. She was upright -- or at least hunching in a remotely upright position -- and dammit, she was going to walk out that door and find a ride to the Tehachapi Pass trailhead and then she would walk to Oregon come hell or high water.

She turned to the door of her motel room, feeling rather like she had a massive growth on her back -- something that was a part of her and yet not, something that moved with her but also of its own accord. But her pack stayed attached, and she didn’t fall over again, which was her biggest fear, because  _ oh god, what if she couldn’t get up again? _

She glanced at the clock again. The morning was in full swing. She needed to leave.

“Get a move on, Erso,” she told herself, and took her first step forward, out the door and into the bright desert sun.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the next chapter: Jyn sets foot on the Pacific Crest Trail for the first time and quickly discovers that hiking is hell.


	3. Left Foot, Right Foot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tehachapi Pass  
> Elevation 3793ft  
> Mile 1  
> Day 1

_What the fuck have I done?_

The voice in her head was barely louder than the crunch of her boots on the dirt and stone beneath her, but the words struck like clenched fists in time with her feet.

 _What --_ **step** \-- _the fuck_ \-- **step** \-- _have_ \-- **step** _\-- I done?_

* * *

_She stood at the edge of the McDonald’s parking lot, shifting on her feet to ease the pain that was slowly settling in on her back. It scared her how much it already hurt. If her pack felt heavy now, just standing in the parking lot waiting for a ride, what would happen when she actually started moving? She pushed the thought from her mind. She had to get to the trail first._

_She couldn’t help feeling like a Grade-A creep, standing there on the sidewalk and staring down families as they pulled up to the drive-thru. But she had to -- she had to take a chance and approach one of those cars and ask for a ride._

_‘It can’t be that hard,’ she kept telling herself as she began to sweat in the summer California sun. ‘Just walk up, say hi.’_

_‘I’m about to walk 600 miles by myself, could you assist me in beginning my suicide mission?’_

_She tried not to let the panic take over. The day was progressing. It would be 100 degrees by the time she got on the trail. She had to make her move, and she had to do it soon._

_A family was walking out of the restaurant, a mom and dad with a young boy and even younger girl, all heading towards a minivan. Jyn grit her teeth and tugged on her shoulder straps._

_Now or never._

_She walked towards the family, thinking hard about what she would say to them as she crossed the asphalt. ‘Hi, my name is Jyn, I’m hiking the PCT…’_

_When she reached the van, the children were shrieking at each other with their Happy Meal toys brandished as weapons, and the mother was shouting at them to knock it off, get in the van! Jyn took a deep breath and stepped forward. The woman’s eyes snapped in her direction and widened before she moved in front of her children, blocking them from view like a hen with her chicks._

_“We don’t carry cash,” she said to Jyn, her voice shaking but stern. “We don’t have anything for you.”_

_"No, I—“ Jyn swallowed. “That’s not — I have money.”_

_The mother frowned. The children were peeking out from behind her, eyes wide and mouths giggling at Jyn. She must look ridiculous, if children were laughing at her._

_“Actually, I wanted to ask —“ She cleared her throat and straightened up as best she could. “My name is Jyn, and I’m hiking the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail? The trailhead is down the road from here, about 11 miles, and I was wondering, um… could you maybe take me there?”_

_The woman’s frown didn’t go away, but her gaze shifted to take in Jyn’s appearance. She hoped the massive backpack would convince the woman that she was telling the truth. She shifted, trying to adjust Judas to a position that was more comfortable, but it wouldn’t budge._

_“How old are you, sweetheart?”_

_Jyn refocused on the woman, her brows drawing down. Normally someone calling her sweetheart rankled her, but she wasn’t bothered this time. Maybe it was because the woman said it like a mother, and not a sleazy biker that wanted in her pants._

_“Um, 21.”_

_Her expression softened suddenly, and she dropped her arms away from her kids and took a step forward._

_"You’re doing this alone?”_

_Jyn let go of her held breath, and nodded._

* * *

Sweat was running into her eyes, the sting only adding to her growing list of hurts. She counted them off in her head as she moved, lifting one heavy-booted foot after the other.

_Sun too bright, sweat in eyes, sunburn, blister on left heel, back and shoulders and hips fucking hell —_

* * *

_The family dropped her off at the exit for Cameron Canyon Road, eleven miles northwest of Mojave on Highway 58. The PCT picked up on the north side of the off-ramp. For some strange reason she’d expected it to bigger than what it was, a gate maybe, or a neon sign. But to Jyn the landscape in front of her was indistinguishable from what she had seen through window of the minivan on the drive here._

_Desert._

_Brown dirt. Brown rocks. Brown scrub grass and tiny lighter-brown baby Joshua trees with tops that she knew were supposed to be green, but in reality were only brown with a faint tinge of olive. It was like the chlorophyll inside had given in to peer pressure from the rocks around it._

_It felt rather anticlimactic, but after she got out of the van and got Judas on her back (she set the pack on the edge of the doorway and squatted to get it on and buckled before she stood — much easier), she waved to the family and walked toward a wooden post that was set into the dirt a few feet away._

_She reached out and ran her fingers over the little metal tag tacked into the post, and her breath hitched in her throat. This marker was the beginning, and its brethren were her guiding stars — scattered along the length of the trail, from the Mexican border all the way to Canada, these little white triangles showed the way._

_Jyn traced the pine tree in the middle of the marker, feeling like she was shaking hands with a new friend._

_She eventually let her hand drop and looked up. She was almost 3800 feet above sea level, and she knew she would climb another 5000 in the next 30 miles. But it had been a statistic before, just numbers, and numbers weren’t daunting._

_The hills rising above her, and the hills she glimpsed behind those —_

**_Those_ ** _scared the shit out of her._

_Wind turbines loomed on the rise to her left, ominous and indifferent to the panic that was beginning to burn in her bones._

**_You can quit any time._ **

_“No,” she said aloud, because if the dirt and grass and sky heard it, then it had to be true._

_“No, I won’t quit.”_

* * *

She wanted to take those words back, wanted to rip the grass that heard them out of the ground by its roots. She was an idiot. A fucking lunatic.

Her legs were on fire. Her muscles screamed against the strain of carrying her pack over the hills that kept getting steeper, the ground that grew rockier. Picking up her foot and swinging it forward to step down again was agony. Lift foot (quads glutes _ow),_  straighten leg (knee shin _shit_ ), plant foot (ankle heel _bloody hell_ ), roll forward (arch toes _fuuuuuck!)._

Her lungs were on fire, too, the dry air scraping the edges of her trachea and burning all the way down. Her mouth was parched from panting, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to gulp down water. She had a long way to go until the first reliable water source.

One drink every five minutes, the guidebooks has said.

She counted the minutes by counting her steps. One step almost every second. Sixty steps took just over one minute according to a glance at her watch. Count to sixty, one. Sixty more steps, two. Sixty and three, sixty and four, sixty and five — _drink_. And that drink was never enough to quench her thirst. There was more desert in her mouth than beneath her feet.

She stopped and turned around, looking back down the trail. The highway was out of sight, the windmills still rose like giants to the west. It was quiet, the only sound the ragged rasp of her breath. The desert went on forever around her — endless, it seemed — and she was a sailor, floating alone in a sea of sage brush and sand.

* * *

 _She_   _signed her name in the trail register — a worn out composition notebook kept inside a metal box with a rusty lid. Her eyes drifted over the names and dates and the bits of words left by those who’d come before, and the pounding of her heart eased. Here was the evidence that others had been here, had stood where she now stood. Had they been afraid? Had they been alone? What had driven them to make this choice?_

_She didn’t know them, might never meet them or see their faces, but they felt familiar all the same._

_Most had written small notes next to their names, pieces of inspiration or encouragement. Jyn read over them, smiling at the cliched “journey begins with a single step” and “follow your dreams,” but she lingered over the last entry, dated three days ago. The quote was longer than the rest, written in short blocky letters._

_**“Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.” — JM (Cassian Andor, mile 566)** _

_It took Jyn a moment to remember to breathe. She blinked away the tears that had welled up in her eyes and inhaled, then let it out again, trying to get a grip._

_How? How had they known?_

_She didn’t know who Cassian Andor was. They would probably never meet. But somehow, this stranger had known she would be here, had written those words knowing that someone would come along that desperately needed to read them._

_They didn’t know it, but Cassian Andor was the most amazing person in the world._

* * *

It was hot. So hot. Too fucking hot to keep going.

Jyn glanced at her watch. She’d been hiking for four hours. When she swiped to see how many miles she’d covered n that time, she almost burst into tears.

4.2 miles.

“No,” she gasped. “No, no no no —“

It took everything in her not to fall to her knees. She’d never get back up if she did.

Four miles. She’d hiked _four fucking miles_. Her body protested that fact, screaming that no, it couldn’t be, if feels like we’ve hiked a hundred. But her tracker wasn’t lying, and deep down she knew it was true.

She’d known, really, that she was grossly unprepared for the demands of this hike. She’d read the blogs and the forums that had detailed training regimens, workouts, tips and tricks to get fit. But she had ignored them, unwilling to acknowledge at the time that there was even the smallest flaw in her plan, that she might not be able to do it simply because she was _weak_. She’d dismissed the warnings, and now she was never going to make it.

The sun beat down on her, the heat relentless. She was exhausted. Her muscles felt cramped. Judas bent her body down towards the dirt, feeling heavier than when she’d begun.

She needed to keep moving. She’d planned on averaging at least fifteen miles a day at the start.

She needed to rest. If she kept going, she’d die of heat stroke.

A little further up the trail was a large rock, a shelf that jutted out towards the trail. There was a small sliver of shadow beneath it. Blessed shade.

She would take a break. Eat something, sip some gatorade. Wait out the remainder of the afternoon heat and start again when it was cooler. Maybe hike into the night. That was encouraged on this stretch of the PCT, where the day temps climbed above 100.

Okay, she decided. Siesta, and then keep going.

She had to keep going.

* * *

_She paused long enough at the trailhead to pull her small camera out of her hipbelt pocket and take a picture. It was hard to take a selfie with a cheap digital point-and-shoot, so it took her a couple of tries to get it right._

_She flipped through the handful of images, feeling a flurry of emotions that didn’t stay still long enough in her stomach to be pinned down._

_She looked so_ **_small_ ** _._

_Part of it was obviously due to the monstrosity she had strapped to her back. But that wasn’t the only reason. There was something else._

_She saw the entirety of her life pressing down on her, heavier than any backpack. The girl in the photo looked young, too young to be hiking 600 miles by herself. She was smiling, but it didn’t light up her eyes like it used to, back before…_

_Jyn wanted desperately to believe that that smile was real, that the girl in the photo was strong and sure of herself and capable of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail on her own._

_She wanted to know if the girl in the photo thought she was brave._

_She was too afraid of the answer to ask._

* * *

The hundred-yard climb up the hill nearly killed her, but she made it.

She didn’t really “take off” her pack -- it was more like forcibly releasing herself from its clutches -- but when it hit the ground with a deafening _thud_ she wasn’t far behind it, collapsing against the boulder in bliss.

She wasn’t entirely sure how she would get it back on, but _fuck it,_ she didn’t care.

She closed her eyes and leaned back against the rock, trying to catch her breath. Her shirt was soaked through with sweat and clung to her back. She thought about taking it off, but her arms wouldn’t respond to her brain’s commands — they were limp and heavy as lead at her side. Her heart was pounding so hard her head hurt, and her chest hurt too, lungs gasping for oxygen even though she’d stopped moving.

She was too tired to think about anything other than the way her body ached. Everything boiled down to her muscles and how they were slowly beginning to burn from the buildup of lactic acid, the sting of the spot on her achilles tendon that her new boot had rubbed raw. She would have to dig out her first aid kit and clean it up, but that meant moving.

Fuck that, too. It could wait.

A wisp of wind drifted over her, cooling her damp skin. The sound that came out of her mouth was obscene, but _oh, fuck yes…_

She felt as though she were melting into the ground beneath her. Her body was so heavy, dead weight. She should get up, set up her tent so that she could get out of the sun. She needed to eat something. Drink Gatorade. Take a nap so she would be rested enough to keep going once the temperature went down with the sun.

She needed to do all of those things, but she couldn’t.

Tendrils of fear began to coil around her chest, threatening to squeeze the life from her. She choked on her next breath and opened her eyes, but the vastness before her only made it worse.

Jyn swallowed and pressed her fists into the dirt.

“I am not afraid,” she said aloud. Her voice was small, so small she almost didn’t hear it, so she cleared her throat and tried again.

“I’m not afraid.” Louder this time, sounding more confident, and trying desperately to feel that way, too.

Louder still, “I’m not afraid” — and she was in a hospital room, Saw’s respirator hissing like the demon that was coming to take him away. She’d said those words to him knowing full well that he’d been too far gone to hear them, but she knew now what she’d denied then: she’d really been talking to herself.

Her whole life had been spent saying those words, spitting them into the faces of anyone who dared to doubt her. She’d said them to social care workers, guidance counselors, the dealers who offered her something new and better. She’d said them to Mama’s headstone, and Saw’s urn, and Papa’s casket. She’d believed it back then, too, that she was unshakable. Would someone that was afraid have been able to do the things she’d done? Would they have said yes instead of no?

She looked up, squinting her eyes against the sun so that she could take in the dome of the sky, painfully blue and so, so bright.

The truth was that she _had_ been afraid. Fucking terrified. The sex, the drugs, the constant running — every decision fueled by the nightmare that was her life.

The wind rattled the dry stalks of scrub grass around her, and she took a deep breath and dug her fingers into the earth.

“I won’t be afraid,” she whispered. “Not anymore.”

* * *

Jyn got her tent up with no problems, which was a massive relief. Out of everything she’d managed to do wrong so far, at least she could assemble her shelter correctly on the first try.

She stared at it for a moment, after she’d pounded the stakes into the dirt. Even though she’d opted for the slightly bigger two-person tent, it still looked tiny to her. It hadn’t looked that way in the store. It had looked compact but sturdy, and she remembered thinking _it will be cozy._ She realized now that being “cozy” in her tent meant having to spoon Judas -- her pack was going to take up half of it. The thought of it was somehow comforting.

The realization that this was where she was sleeping for the night hit her as she sat down in the door of her tent to eat. It should bother her, she thought as she wearily chewed a handful of trail mix. She’d planned to cover a lot of distance on her first day, had imagined herself only coming to a stop because she no longer had daylight to guide her steps. But her exhaustion had given her a startling clarity: if she kept going now, she’d likely hurt herself, either from pulling a muscle or sun stroke or worse. She’d gotten a late start anyway, she reasoned, and not a lot of sleep the night before. It was best if she camped here tonight.

Once the decision had been made, Jyn felt a bit better. She ate a few more mouthfuls of trail mix and then reached for her pack to ready her tent for the night.

She unrolled her sleeping pad and laid it out on the floor of the tent, then dug her sleeping bag out of her pack and released it from the compression sack it had been forced into. A quick shake fluffed the down fill back up, and she gently spread it out on top of the pad. She resisted the urge to fall straight onto it and pass out. She was still clothed in sweat-stiff gear and wasn’t about to get her bag filthy just because she wanted to sleep.

Jyn slowly peeled off her clothes, her body protesting against the twisting of limbs as she removed her boots and set them outside her tent, and then her socks and shirt and shorts. She laid these over her pack so that they could air out. Her sports bra was next, and the exertion of getting it off about killed her, but the feeling of fresh air against her bare breasts made her eyes flutter shut and a sigh escape her lips. Her underwear followed, and then she was sitting naked in her tent, panting a bit and utterly spent.

But she didn’t hurry to put on her sleeping clothes right away. She took a moment instead to look out at the desert. It was around five o’clock and there was still plenty of daylight left, but the light had shifted -- the sun was making its descent towards the hills to the west, and shadows were beginning to grow. A breeze came through the door of her tent, and while it was a relief from the heat, the edge of it was cold. The temperatures would drop rapidly as soon as the sun disappeared over the ridge, and she knew she needed to get dressed, but something held her back.

She didn’t know what made her do it, but she climbed out of her tent and planted her bare feet into the dirt to stand naked in the open air. The breeze from earlier had picked up, and her skin erupted in goosebumps at the chill, but she clenched her fists and curled her toes and stayed there, her gaze on the horizon.

 _I am here,_ she thought. _I’ve made it this far._

She was wearier than she’d ever been, and she ached from the soles of her feet to the ends of every hair on her head, but she felt the spark of something flicker in her stomach as she stared down the desert in nothing but her skin.

“I can do this,” she said. She lifted her chin, spoke clear and firm, “I _will_ do this.”

There was no one around for miles to contradict her, but it didn’t matter.

For the first time, she actually believed it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, comments are never expected but are always appreciated. 
> 
> Find me on tumblr @kotaface for drabbles, fic previews, or just to chat!


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